alt Hacker NewsUN Human right article 12
"Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks." https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
"arbitrary interference with his privacy"
That is tech companies does not have right to private data through data fusion. We humans collectivly have the right to privacy.
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A right is like a trademark. It must be defended, or it loses its power.
Lately, a German colleague shared with me why they are so focused on privacy. For the dark events that happened in Germany from 1933 to the end of WW2, they used data from a variety of sources that were available at that time. There’s a serious fear (now more than ever in the past) that if an authoritarian regime rose again it would have access to so much data to persecute minorities or even people with different opinions that it would seriously be a nightmare. This puts often overlooked initiatives like GDPR in a completely different light to me.
This UN declaration doesn’t seem to establish an enduring definition of privacy.
Hayek offers a significant observation that things that work among small orders, like a family, don’t work when applied to a whole city. It speaks to the gap between a single police officer seeing something and a city-wide camera crime detection network.
Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or say our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. [Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit]If you are in a country which has some decent legal system and institutions.
And even then it’s a crap shoot
The UN, a global entity that isn’t worth the paper its existence it’s written on. Probably the best ever example of the term “paper tiger”
A right to privacy the European Convention on Human Rights which every European country other than Belarus is a signatory to. It is directly incorporated into UK law and in all signatory countries appeals can be made to the European Court of Human Rights.
Some governments ignore it, pretty much all governments have tried to find ways to limit the right to privacy. It has not been terribly effective. As far as I can tell constitutional protections in a few countries (like Germany) have been far more effective.